Canon MV5i MC

As far as the consumer DV market goes, Canon believes that size does matter. The MV5i MC is the company's smallest camcorder. It looks stunning and slips effortlessly into a coat pocket. Sadly, though, the minute size of Canon's consumer range has meant ditching its lovely optical image stabiliser in favour of a far inferior electronic one. The optical image stabiliser was once a standard part of the whole Canon range and was reason enough to buy a Canon cam.

On the plus side, even this tiny model eschews a bottom-loading tape carriage. The cassette loads at the back, which is an easy procedure, even with the cam on a tripod. The fixed viewfinder, however, can't be tilted, making it awkward to use at times. Also, while the LCD viewscreen is clear, it's small at 2in and hard to use in bright sun.

The indoor results were passable, delivering decent detail, but there was substantial noise and focus-hunting in low light. Also, under red light, colour seemed washed out, but detail was still rich. Colour reproduction and detail under blue and green were good, while image stabilisation could result in a slight trailing effect, but this was seldom noticeable.

Performance in daylight was better, showing no picture noise, excellent colour reproduction and good detail in shadows and highlights. Auto focus and automatic exposure were very responsive too, and the overall video was let down only by weak image stabilisation.

Device control and video capture via DV work like a charm, and the MV5i MC can also record analog video to DV tape or channel it out of its FireWire port. SD Card support is present as well, providing image capture up to 1,024 x 768. High-resolution stills are a little noisy, but fine for many web or multimedia-based projects.